Revealing Photo Series Documents School Lunches From Around the World (And The Embarrassing U.S. Equivalent)

These images are all from a recent photo series, created by the salad chain Sweetgreen, showing what school lunches look like around the world. Each plate is meant to be representative of a typical lunch and was put together by intepreting local government standards and studying Tumblr photos taken by elementary students.

“We wanted to look at how kids are eating around the world–not in a literal way, not that this is exactly how every plate looks, but as a way to relate to how we eat in this country,” says Sweetgreen’s co-founder Nic Jammet, who started the company with his friends while in college because they were sick of their school’s own mediocre cafeteria food.

The company says that the photos illustrate the basic fact that we shouldn’t necessarily be eating the same thing in every location. “You should be eating what grows around you,” says Jammet. But they also show how far the U.S. has to go to give kids anything approaching a balanced diet.

Join the artFido Newsletter

artFido’s videos and content are viewed more than 2.5 billion times a month. This makes the network the seventh most viewed media company in the online sphere, behind the Walt Disney company in sixth place, and in front of US media giant Comcast in eighth place.*